Hello,
My Windows 7 had gone mad on my sony vaio laptop. Forgeting about Grub 1, I started the windows 7 reinstall program. (I installed Grub 1 along with a Debian distrib).

After the first reboot, Grub came in and threw me into grub rescue mode saying that it couldn't find partitions again. Grb rescue did a terrible job at helping as no known command(even "help") worked.

I grabbed my debian DVDs, and head to forums where I spent about 2 hours trying to understand how grub could be uninstalled. I tried to follow what that guy is saying: http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/.../msg00698.html.

Now when the computer boots it says straight from the BIOS that no OS is found. When running fdisk -l from debian DVD it says that no valid parition table is found.

Ok, so my own conclusion to this is: I fucked up all my paritions, including my separate backup partition where all my data was stored. I have lost the sony vaio restore partition.

Is this correct? Or any genius out there can sniff the partitions back and reinstall the table?

Now, my other -and most important question is - If I buy a windows 7 CD, will it be able to handle my computer as it is now with no proper partition table? Or must I prepare some sort of table for it to at least finds its way?

Best Regards,

O.

Were you trying to install an older version of Debian? The most recent use Grub2 and the grub commands used for the old Grub are not going to work on the new Grub.

How did you get from started the windows 7 reinstall program to grub rescue? Did you reinstall windows 7 successfully? Doesn't seem so. Any indications of the progress? If fdisk doesn't show anything, you could try GParted which should be on the DVD for Debian to see if it shows any partitions. You might try using Testdisk to recover data. You can google and download it or the SystemRescueCD to try to recover some data.

The partition tables are not on the computer unless it is an OEM install with the OS preinstalled so it would be created from the installation CD or DVD. If it is an OEM install, you should be able to buy the install CD from the manufacturer.

Do your drives show up in /etc/dev/? as sda or hba?

If they do try to run fdisk as:


From there you may want to restore the dos partition table(option O).

I had trouble before with Vista not finding my drive(I had to restore the dos partition, create a FAT filesystem and then have Vista overwrite it) and not being able to write over lilo but never had trouble with Windows 7 and grub.

Also, using Gparted as Yancek suggested may give you better results that fdisk -l

If you did delete your recovery partition though you may need to contact your manufacturer.

Hello guys,
Sorry for not replying faster. I tried all your advices. I couldn't find again my sda using your tips. I called the Vaio support and they sent me restore CDs. Also note that just as it is the case with the restoration mode included in the computer, Sony Vaio restore trashes all your partition tables and resets everything factory mode. It's a hard reset, badly designed, but that works. So watch out guys, pushing the "restore" button on a vaio is a hard stuff.

Thanks again for your feedbacks,

O.

So you have a fresh canvas to try again.

What you can do is reduce the Windows volume and allow unallocated space for another OS. For a Linux Base 30 or 40 GB is good, also you can allow more if you have the room in your hard drive.
Then when is installing time you can tell the installer to put the new OS in that unallocated space.
The installer will format the space, so you don't have to format it when you create the partition.
Keep in mind to install the loader at the MBR.

Good luck to you.